Lisa Feldman Barrett in The Guardian:

Last week, my whole outlook on the world was transformed by a sheet of blank paper. Not just any paper, but beautifully embossed stationery, silky to the touch and decadent to write on. It was a gift from a dear friend and colleague. We collaborate over Zoom every week, so I could have thanked him on video, but instead I wrote a short note of gratitude and love, and posted it to him. His delight on receipt a few days later mirrored my own, and we shared a moment of emotional connection.

Before that moment, I was immersed in yet another “Blursday” full of Covid-saturated, this-will-never-end moroseness, staring alone at a screen that makes my skin look pallid. Afterwards, to my surprise, I was alight in a sprawling web of human connections. But I shouldn’t have been surprised: I am a neuroscientist who studies how the brain creates your mood. In fact, if you understand a bit about your brain’s inner workings, it may help you to cultivate comfort from those around you, whether physically or in spirit, in difficult times.

Research shows that in every moment of your life, your brain regulates the insides of your body, including your organs, hormones and immune system, to keep you alive. The process is like running a household budget, but instead of money, your brain budgets water, salt, glucose and other bodily resources as you gain and lose them. Actions that spend resources, such as exercise or stressful conversations, are like withdrawals from your account. Actions that replenish resources, such as eating, sleeping, and cuddling a beloved pet are like deposits.

More here.

Danielle Allen in The Atlantic:

Breaking & Entering

Only beasts are supposed to hibernate.
But this brother has been lying there
for years. Truth isn’t a news headline.
Between the lines lay his body, between
brush strokes
his soul ascends doing those things
portraits rarely capture:
giving life, giving face, serving.
A Black man’s body
on display hangs in a museum.
He appears wrapped in a bed sheet
covering his private parts as if
he was a sexless Christ,
as if his private parts made him prey,
or as if both prey and Jesus were one in the same.
But perhaps it’s just respectful to cover
a dead man or at least to cover where he may have been
broken into. Praise to the angel who gave
him wings of canvas and gesso paint—
a better burial than the other brothers got,
those over there, just left on the street.

by Darrel Alejandro Holnes
from Split This Rock

Sleep by Kehinde Wiley: Oil on Canvas: 2008

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

What is memory? I carried with me for more than forty years the distorted and etiolated memory-trace of what I believed was an anti-nuclear protest concert, held around 1979, somewhere in America, featuring James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Peter Frampton, and other stars of that long-forgotten era. Throughout all these decades I was convinced that the concert had been called “Nukes Knocks [sic] Your Socks Off”, or perhaps, alternatively, “Nukes Knocks Yer Sox Off”.

Adjacent to this memory was another one, of my father’s hippie friend’s son, who would later end up in Louisiana’s Angola Prison, I was told, for some crime or other involving heroin. The adolescent, six years or so my elder, entered the living-room where I was patiently waiting as our respective dads fiddled with a vintage printing press in the basement. He pulled a record out of its sleeve, blew on it, and said casually, “You like Sabbath?” I was eight years old. “Yeah,” I said. And his shirt, I recall as clear as day, bore a message: “Nukes Knocks Your Socks Off”.

I have Googled that phrase every six months or so since around 2005, and until recently I continued to turn up nothing. I did turn up records of a concert held in 1979 under the title “No Nukes” —featuring Taylor and Browne, though not Frampton—, as well as of an eponymous concert film from the following year. But that’s not what I was looking for. I was looking, much more precisely, for “Nukes Knocks Your Socks Off”. This phrase had become one of the most vexing items on the list of what I had come to think of, with a hat-tip to Barbara Cassin, as the “Ungoogleables”.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s a truism that what we see about the world is a small fraction of all that exists. At the simplest level of physics and biology, our senses are drastically limited; we only see a narrow spectrum of electromagnetic waves, and we only hear a narrow band of sound. We don’t feel neutrinos or dark matter at all, even as they pass through our bodies, and we can’t perceive microscopic objects. While science can help us overcome some of these limitations, they do shape how we think about the world. Ziya Tong takes this idea and expands it to include the parts of our social and moral worlds that are effectively invisible to us — from where our food comes from to how we decide how wealth is allocated in society.

More here.

Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Macky Sall, António Guterres, Charles Michel, and Ursula Von Der Leyen in Project Syndicate:

Our world has experienced diverging trends, leading to increased prosperity globally, while inequalities remain or increase. Democracies have expanded at the same time that nationalism and protectionism have seen a resurgence. Over the past decades, two major crises have disrupted our societies and weakened our common policy frameworks, casting doubt on our capacity to overcome shocks, address their root causes, and secure a better future for generations to come. They have also reminded us of how interdependent we are.

The most serious crises call for the most ambitious decisions to shape the future. We believe that this one can be an opportunity to rebuild consensus for an international order based on multilateralism and the rule of law through efficient cooperation, solidarity, and coordination. In this spirit, we are determined to work together, with and within the United Nations, regional organizations, international fora such as the G7 and G20, and ad hoc coalitions to tackle the global challenges we face now and in the future.

Health is the first emergency.

More here.

Ann Patchett at Harper’s Magazine:

I can tell you where it all started because I remember the moment exactly. It was late and I’d just finished the novel I’d been reading. A few more pages would send me off to sleep, so I went in search of a short story. They aren’t hard to come by around here; my office is made up of piles of books, mostly advance-reader copies that have been sent to me in hopes I’ll write a quote for the jacket. They arrive daily in padded mailers—novels, memoirs, essays, histories—things I never requested and in most cases will never get to. On this summer night in 2017, I picked up a collection called Uncommon Type, by Tom Hanks. It had been languishing in a pile by the dresser for a while, and I’d left it there because of an unarticulated belief that actors should stick to acting. Now for no particular reason I changed my mind. Why shouldn’t Tom Hanks write short stories? Why shouldn’t I read one? Off we went to bed, the book and I, and in doing so put the chain of events into motion. The story has started without my realizing it. The first door opened and I walked through.

But any story that starts will also end. This is the way novelists think: beginning, middle, and end.

In case you haven’t read it, Uncommon Type is a very good book. It would have to be for this story to continue. Had it been a bad book or just a good-enough book, I would have put it down, but page after page it surprised me.

more here.

To appreciate the isness of being
is the luckiest of pleasures.
………………….—Anonymous

4 P.M.

The way the snow is slick,
flat and dully light, and
the trees stand still
in the simple shapes of themselves.

How nothing moves right now
in in-between light
that only means itself.
I love this time of day,

the silence of this empty house—
dishes lying on the rack,
lamps unlit, fruits round
and obtuse in the bowl.

The mannerly way
the pot is on the stove,
how the plants don’t know
they are growing.

by Gene Zeiger
from Leaving Egypt
White Pine Press, 1995

Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

When Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial opens this week, the prosecution and defense will spend much time debating whether it is unconstitutional to try a President no longer in office—a dodge Republicans have seized upon to avoid taking responsibility for Trump’s actions on January 6th and to avoid his wrath. With conviction now unlikely, the trial offers Democratic senators and the handful of open Trump skeptics among the Republicans a chance to engrave Trump’s assault on the Constitution into the historical record. But the trial will also be a forward-looking political forum—a preview of how January 6th will figure in electoral competition between Democrats and Republicans, and among Republicans, in the months ahead.

Trump’s lawyers and acolytes have already made plain some of the political ground they prefer to fight on: the defense of the First Amendment. Impeaching Trump for mobilizing the January protesters with false claims about election rigging “is a very, very dangerous road to take with respect to the First Amendment, putting at risk any passionate political speaker,” one of Trump’s impeachment lawyers, David Schoen, told Sean Hannity on Fox News last week. The initial fourteen-page brief that Schoen and his co-counsel Bruce Castor filed in Trump’s defense mentions the First Amendment five times, aligning its arguments with the “cancel culture” protestations so prominent in conservative discourse: “If the First Amendment protected only speech the government deemed popular in current American culture, it would be no protection at all.”

As a defense against the House’s impeachment charge, however, the legal protections afforded by the First Amendment are largely irrelevant.

More here.

Judith Hawley at Literary Review:

While Mary Wollstonecraft earned her place at the table for pioneering women in Judy Chicago’s art installation The Dinner Party (1974–9), she would not be everyone’s ideal guest. She has a reputation as an acerbic killjoy. She deemed novels to be the ‘spawn of idleness’. She did not embrace women in sisterhood but censured them for their propensity to ‘despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain’. Wollstonecraft has proved both an inspiration and a challenge to those who have come after her.

Her life and works, as Sylvana Tomaselli demonstrates in this wide-ranging new book, contain startling contradictions. On the one hand, she championed women’s capacity for reason in an age that largely treated them as sentimental playthings and decorative accessories for men. On the other, she fell passionately in love with the dashing and unscrupulous American businessman Gilbert Imlay.

more here.

Michelle Alexander in The New York Times:

Once upon a time, I thought that it was perfectly appropriate for restaurant workers to earn less than minimum wage. Tipping, in my view, was a means for customers to show gratitude and to reward a job well done. If I wanted to earn more as a restaurant worker, then I needed to hustle more, put more effort into my demeanor, and be a bit more charming.

…The first week on the job, one of my white co-workers, a middle-aged woman from rural Oregon, pulled me aside after she watched a group of rowdy white men, who had been rude and condescending to me throughout their meal, walk out the door without leaving a tip. “From now on, dear,” she said, “I’ll take the rednecks. Just pass ’em on to me.” This became a kind of joke between us — a wink and a nod before we switched tables — except it wasn’t funny. The risk that my race, not the quality of my work, would determine how much I was paid for my services was ever-present.

So was the risk that I would be punished for not flirting with the men I served. Men of all ages commented on my looks, asked me if I had a boyfriend, slipped me their phone numbers, and expected me to laugh along with their sexist jokes. I often played along, after learning from experience that the price of resistance would be the loss of tips that I had rightfully earned.

The truth was, though, that I was shielded from the biggest risk that tipped workers face: not being able to make ends meet.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Sean Hooks in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

George Saunders, now in his early 60s, is a long-standing professor in the MFA Creative Writing program at Syracuse University’s College of Arts & Sciences. Widely recognized as one of the great living practitioners of the short story form, Saunders is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and a winner of the Booker Prize for his first novel, 2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo. I conducted this interview at the end of 2020 in preparation for the release of his first nonfiction standalone title, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, an eclectic and engrossing text that condenses the experience of workshopping with a master writer well-versed in instruction and invested in the continued development of his own reading acumen. I emailed George the questions, and he replied with alacrity, composing his answers in what I like to think of as the Nabokovian Strong Opinions mode.

More here.  And a review of A Swim in the Pond in the Rain here.

Joseph Fridman in Aeon:

The machine they built is hungry. As far back as 2016, Facebook’s engineers could brag that their creation ‘ingests trillions of data points every day’ and produces ‘more than 6 million predictions per second’. Undoubtedly Facebook’s prediction engines are even more potent now, making relentless conjectures about your brand loyalties, your cravings, the arc of your desires. The company’s core market is what the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff describes as ‘prediction products’: guesses about the future, assembled from ever-deeper forays into our lives and minds, and sold on to someone who wants to manipulate that future.

Yet Facebook and its peers aren’t the only entities devoting massive resources towards understanding the mechanics of prediction. At precisely the same moment in which the idea of predictive control has risen to dominance within the corporate sphere, it’s also gained a remarkable following within cognitive science. According to an increasingly influential school of neuroscientists, who orient themselves around the idea of the ‘predictive brain’, the essential activity of our most important organ is to produce a constant stream of predictions: predictions about the noises we’ll hear, the sensations we’ll feel, the objects we’ll perceive, the actions we’ll perform and the consequences that will follow. Taken together, these expectations weave the tapestry of our reality – in other words, our guesses about what we’ll see in the world become the world we see.

More here.

Ken Roth at Human Rights Watch:

In his biggest policy announcement, he said the US government would end support for offensive operations in Yemen. That’s an important step, given the Saudi-led coalition’s disturbing pattern of using US precision weapons and intelligence to hit Yemeni civilian targets such as markets, funerals, and even a school bus. Trump closed his eyes to all that in the name of (illusory) US jobs. Biden rightfully will have nothing to do with it.

Biden noted that the US government would continue to help Saudi Arabia to defend itself from missile and drone attacks. But he didn’t address other abuses by one-time members of the Saudi-led coalition, such as the United Arab Emirates, which has been supporting highly abusive forces in Libya. The US government should have nothing to do with that, either.

Biden addressed the importance of alliances and partnerships. While Trump largely abandoned the defense of human rights, other governments came to the fore—Latin American democracies on Venezuela, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation for Rohingya Muslims, various Western governments on China, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, among others. Arguably, the defense of human rights is more powerful today than four years ago because it is more genuinely global. The US government’s task is to join that multilateral effort, not supplant it.

More here.

Robert Paarlberg in The Harvard Gazette:

At a recent dinner party, the hostess served me a tasty salad with carrots, raisins, nuts, and baby greens. “It’s all organic,” she said, expecting my approval. To be polite, I smiled and said nothing, but a voice inside wanted to respond, “You paid too much.”

Nearly half of all Americans claim to prefer organic food, and the label has spread far beyond food. You can now buy organic lipstick, organic underwear, and even organic water. The 2019 Super Bowl featured ads for organic beer, and health-conscious smokers are able to purchase organic cigarettes. Most farmers, however, have little interest in switching to the more costly and less convenient production methods required for organic certification, so this constrains the supply, which makes organic food needlessly expensive. America’s farmers so far have certified less than 1 percent of their cropland for organic production, and fewer than 2 percent of commodities grown in 2017 were organic. Processed and packaged foods can now be organic as well, but fewer than 6 percent of total retail food purchases are organic products. Two decades after federal organic certification began in America, the brand remains a single-digit phenomenon.

More here.